Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (13 page)

Hotchkiss set to work. He was untrained in cartography but methodical. He first surveyed the terrain from horseback, making sketches and notes as he moved around the terrain, then worked his observations up into a finished product. His 1862 map of the Valley still exists.
¹⁶
The course of the rivers is shown in pale blue, the road network in red, hills (uncontoured and without spot heights) in black, by hatching. There is no scale though, as the bottom of the sheet has been torn off, it may simply be missing. As a map, it reflects all the defects of those of the Civil War period: the appearance is messy, there is both too much and too little detail, and it has an unfinished, amateur look. Compared to the clear and elegant map of Yorktown, on the Virginia Peninsula, drawn by Thomas Jefferson Cram from an original by one of the French
ingénieurs géographes
of Rochambeau’s army in 1781, it is a very inferior thing.
¹⁷
It is perhaps unsurprising that Jackson disliked the drawing classes at West Point more than any other subject. It seems probable that mapmaking was badly taught at the Academy, and if Federal military mapmaking, which in Europe and particularly Britain set the standard, was defective, it would follow that American mapmaking in general was unsatisfactory.

Still, Hotchkiss provided Jackson with a map based on local knowledge and derived from contemporary observation, and that put the general on a superior footing to his Union opponents. As late as 1864, during Jubal Early’s resumption of the Confederate offensive in the Valley, the Northern general Philip Sheridan was found to be conducting operations against him from an inaccurate civilian map thirty years old. Hotchkiss’ map told Jackson at least plain essentials: where the gaps in the mountains were, distances between inhabited places, compass orientations, crossing points over the waterways, the course of paved routes. It was better than nothing and would serve him well. Positively bad maps of the Valley would lead his Northern enemies into serious error.

The Valley campaign of 1862 opened at a moment of strategic equilibrium between Union and Confederacy, after one Union offensive had been checked in the west, but before McClellan’s began on the coast, in the east. During 1861 the Confederacy had lost much territory west of the Appalachian chain, which marked the physical boundary between the two theatres of war. Most of the state of Missouri, largely Southern in sentiment, had been lost in August, despite a technical Confederate victory at Wilson’s Creek. Kentucky, also pro-South, was held for the North by a well-timed advance organised by the junior but aggressive General U. S. Grant. He would be encouraged by his success to embark on an advance into Tennessee, bringing the capture of the strategic river forts of Henry and Donelson, but then leading to the costly pitched battle of Shiloh in April 1862. The Confederates’ western front, consolidated by a new overall commander for the theatre, Albert Sidney Johnston (who died at Shiloh), would be held largely intact for the rest of the year.

In the east, where the Union had begun a campaign, progressively crippling to the South, to secure control of the Confederacy’s coastline, little dry land had changed hands in 1861. Following the Confederate defensive victory at Bull Run, Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Northern Virginia had remained close to Washington, threatening the Federal capital. Its presence caused constant anxiety to President Lincoln, particularly because its size was consistently exaggerated by his new General-in-Chief, George McClellan. In March 1862 Joseph E. Johnston withdrew it south of the Rappahannock, one of the west–east waterlines that defended Richmond. That move somewhat relieved Lincoln’s concern for the security of his capital; but it objectively complicated McClellan’s plan to take the Confederacy’s by his seaborne invasion, since it put the South’s largest army closer to his ultimate objective.

On a large-scale map—paradoxically, in mapmaking, the larger the scale, the less the detail shown; one mile to one inch, small scale, is much more informative than ten miles to one inch, large-scale, though the latter is the more useful for strategic planning—the situation in March 1862 would have looked thus: Joseph E. Johnston, with 40,000 men in the Army of Northern Virginia, stood on the Rappahannock, forty miles north of Richmond; McClellan, with 155,000 men in the Army of the Potomac, was sailing it down that river to land at Fortress Monroe at the tip of the Virginian Peninsula, sixty miles from Richmond; various Northern detachments, under the command of Nathaniel Banks, amounting to some 20,000, protected Washington. In the Appalachian Mountains to the west, other Union generals deployed detachments of various strength. Implanted in the middle of the theatre, confronting but also threatened by the Union forces in the mountains and around Washington, Stonewall Jackson deployed fewer than 5,000 men to protect Joseph E. Johnston’s flank, to hold the Federals in the mountains at bay and to deter Banks from bringing the Northern defenders of Washington down to assist McClellan in his seaborne advance on Richmond.
¹⁸

In unbroken country—the flat, unforested, unwatered terrain of the Great Plains, say—Jackson’s position would have been untenable. He would have been swept up during a few days of fighting in a concentric advance by Banks and the Northerners to the west. Jackson, however, was not in that vulnerable position. He had the mountains and rivers of the Shenandoah Valley on his side and, by employing the accidents of geography, natural and man-made, to his advantage, might overcome the odds confronting him. In the months of March, April, May and June 1862, he defied every probability in the most brilliant exercise in manoeuvre warfare, depending wholly upon superior use of intelligence, in the broadest sense, perhaps ever achieved.

The Valley Army (formally the Army of the Shenandoah Valley District) began its virtuoso campaign of diversion at the head of the Shenandoah Valley, where it had spent a hard winter near Romney, Jackson’s boyhood home. His orders were to avoid pitched battle but to operate in such a manner as to prevent Banks, outside Washington, from reinforcing McClellan as he advanced on Richmond. As events unfolded, he was to fight several pitched battles but nevertheless achieve the spirit of his instructions.

Though tied to Washington, Banks was also under orders to clear the northern end of the Valley and in late February he crossed the Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah at Harper’s Ferry, then he advanced south. His purpose was to protect the two strategic lines of communication, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (connecting the sea to the Ohio River system beyond the Appalachians) and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (a principal rail route westward through the Appalachian Mountains), from Confederate interference. Jackson at first proposed attacking his advance guards at Winchester, where a railroad spur terminated at the Valley Turnpike, believing that he could inflict a defeat on the Union forces while they remained dispersed. The plan, however, defied Joseph E. Johnston’s order to decline action; while Johnston was withdrawing his army from Manassas to protect Richmond, he was particularly anxious not to risk a defeat anywhere that would allow Banks to bring his army to reinforce McClellan’s. Jackson’s plan also frightened his subordinates, who were sure they would be beaten. After a heated debate in a council of war, his first, on the evening of 11 March, Jackson gave up the argument. As he rode away into the darkness, he burst out to Dr. McGuire, his chief medical officer, “That is the last council of war I will ever hold.”

He was to be as good as his word; indeed, better. It is a military catchphrase that “Councils of War never fight”—the phrase was to be President Theodore Roosevelt’s but the idea is as old as antiquity—and, after the timidity shown by his brigadiers at Winchester, Jackson withdrew into himself.
¹⁹
Famously taciturn even in his cadet days at West Point and much more given to private prayer than conversation, he henceforth kept his thoughts to himself, revealing his intentions only at the last moment and then in peremptory, often cryptic orders. That was not a deliberate security measure, more a reflection of his introverted nature; but it had the highly desirable effect, in what was to be a campaign of repeated surprises, of shrouding the unexpected in silence.

Between 11 and 20 March, the Valley Army retreated southward down the Valley Turnpike, covered by the cavalry force under Turner Ashby. Ashby was a born cavalier, untrained in formal cavalry tactics but a horseman to his fingertips and a dasher and doer. At times during the campaign, his and his troopers’ lack of discipline would infuriate the professional Jackson, but his relentless aggressiveness always restored him to his general’s favour. Meanwhile, as the retreat lengthened, Jackson was pondering his strategy. “Mobility was the essential factor in the Valley Army’s future.”
²⁰
The army could manoeuvre successfully in the face of a superior enemy, however, only if it made correct use of the Valley’s geography, forced the enemy to make mistakes and denied Banks the use of essential links in the communication chain. It was a crucial factor in Jackson’s calculations to know that his opponent was not a professional soldier, indeed not a soldier at all; a leading type of the Civil War “political” general, appointed for party reasons, Banks had been a Congressman, Speaker of the House of Representatives and most recently Governor of Massachusetts. Jackson’s calculations essentially turned, nevertheless, on objective, not subjective factors: roads, bridges, rivers, hills. Now that Banks was inside the Valley, he had to keep him there, but without fighting battles he might lose. He also had to keep at a safe distance from the Union forces to the west, in the Allegheny Mountains. Finally, he had to keep open his line of withdrawal eastward towards Richmond, should Joseph E. Johnston send for him to assist in the defence of the city against McClellan’s army in the Peninsula.

His first thought was of bridges: those to be denied to the enemy, those essential to his army’s ability to manoeuvre. There were many in the Valley, most wooden and easily combustible, but some of critical importance. Two were railroad bridges, one over the South River at the southern end of the Valley, which Jackson needed if he were to escape by rail to Richmond, and one at Front Royal on the Manassas Gap Rail Road, a main line in the Northern supply chain. It had already been burnt by Jackson’s headquarters guard, and he had sent the rolling stock beyond it south to prevent Banks from using the wagons in a subsequent advance.

Of the road bridges, the headquarters guard had also burnt the one at Front Royal, to impede Banks’ advance down the Luray Valley, east of the Massanutten Mountain into which the North Fork flowed. The three bridges at Luray were essential to Jackson, however, were he to decide to slip across the central mountains through the Massanutten gap, and he also needed to preserve the spans at Port Republic and Conrad’s Store, both crossing the South Fork or its tributary, which carried roads leading through the Blue Ridge gaps and so to Richmond. Finally, there was a wooden bridge at Rude’s Hill, where the Valley Turnpike crossed the North Fork, which was perhaps the most important of all. If destroyed, with Banks to the north and Jackson to the south, its loss would stop a Northern advance dead at that point. Equally, its destruction behind Jackson’s back would terminate his chance of opening a counter-offensive up the Valley west of the Massanutten.

A dispassionate observer, taking his stance in mid-March 1862 at Staunton, Jackson’s main base at the extreme south of the Valley, would have assessed the situation thus: Banks, having failed to follow up Jackson’s retreat from Winchester with energy, was stuck between that place and Strasburg but retained the option of moving down either the North or South Forks; the latter manoeuvre would require bridging at Front Royal but that was within his army’s capability. Jackson, at Mount Jackson on the North Fork, had two choices: he could reverse his retreat and move up the Turnpike to find and fight Banks near Winchester; or he could cross through the Massanutten Gap to enter the Luray Valley and open a new offensive front.

The second choice, however, would take the Valley Army off the macadamised Turnpike onto dirt roads, limit its mobility and expose the main base at Staunton to Federal attack. Jackson therefore decided, even though he thereby kept himself further from contact with Johnston at Richmond and nearer to the remaining Federal forces in the Alleghenies, to retrace his steps and bring Banks to battle at Winchester. Moreover, he was encouraged to reverse his course by Johnston, who, retreating towards the Richmond river lines from Manassas, now expressed the anxiety that Jackson had got too far away from Banks. “Would not your presence with your troops nearer Winchester prevent the enemy from diminishing his force there? . . . I think it important to keep that army in the Valley, and that it should not reinforce McClellan. Do try and prevent it by getting and keeping as near as prudence will permit.”
²¹

He had implicitly not encouraged Jackson to seek battle, but Jackson was not prudent when he scented the chance of a successful fight. On receipt of Johnston’s despatch, he immediately turned north again, marched through unseasonal snow on 22 March and, on the 23rd, found contact with Banks’ advance guard at the village of Kernstown, five miles short of Winchester.

Ashby’s cavalry opened the engagement, skirmishing forward during the morning with infantry in support. As the Union troops opposite began to form a line of battle, he fell back, to meet Jackson bringing up the main body. Ashby may have sent word to Jackson that he was opposed by only four regiments; alternatively, the intelligence may have come from local spies. In either case, Jackson was misinformed. The Federals were in much greater number, about 10,000 to Jackson’s 4,000, and with plentiful artillery, which, quickly brought into action from well-chosen positions, began to cause casualties.